Porsche’s 918 Spyder shines

DanNeil

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

The 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder, a hybrid, is the world's fastest production car.

There is a small red button on the steering wheel of the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder, the company’s new plug-in hybrid super sports car/Romulan war bird. Press that button if you want to set a record at the Nürburgring.

Germany’s idyllic cross-country road-racing circuit, the “Ring’s” Nordschleife, north loop, is draped across 13 miles of forested Rhineland, with 1,000 feet of elevation changes, about 170 perfectly epic corners, and plenty of conveniently placed Armco and tire walls in case newbies misjudge the line (all the time). The place is huge, bewildering and magical. If the “Ring” isn’t on your bucket list, you need a bigger bucket.

For reasons that exceed logic, the Nordschleife lap record has become the essential statistic when it comes to sports cars, the one fully harmonized measure of a car’s envelope of performance, the reference, the result. The “Ring” humbles (Ferrari 458 Italia; 7:32), the “Ring” reveals (Chevrolet Corvette ZR1; 7:19). There is great power in the “Ring.”

“The Nürburgring is the ultimate test of horsepower, aerodynamics and handling,” said 918 project director Frank Walliser last week. In several ways, Walliser acknowledged, the company’s newest supercar is purpose-built for the unique exercise of “Ring” record setting.

Last week, on a bright, cool morning in the Eifel Mountains, test driver Marc Lieb strapped into a black 918 bristling with cameras and antennas, pressed the so-called “Hot Lap” driving-mode button, and tore off down the track for his second attempt of the morning (historians note: his first pass was 6:59). Among other programming changes, the Hot Lap button authorizes the maximum rate of discharge of the car’s 6.8 kwh, 385 volt lithium-ion battery—a stupendous 230 kilowatts and nearly 600 amps—for as long as the electrons last.

On the Nordschleife, at full-bore, that takes one lap. One stupendously fast lap. Six minutes and 57 seconds later, as designed, the 918 Spyder crossed the line in a murdering howl, seizing the production-car lap record and leaving the likes of the Gumpert Apollo Sport (7:11) and Lexus LFA (7:14) for dead. Porsche’s gas-electric tornado gets around the “Ring” one half-minute faster than the colossal Porsche Carrera GT.

And there was much rejoicing. German engineers are so cute when they’re happy. “I cried out for the whole team,” Walliser said later. “There was a lot of pressure and everybody wanted to get the most out of the car.”

Now, why is this important to you, dear reader? Because, bench racing. If you have to own a car that, fair and square, empirically and probably, just is the highest performing sports car of the early 21st century, your next car is the Porsche 918 Spyder, which begins in serial production Wednesday. And Porsche
POAHY, -3.25%PAH3, -3.58%
will build 918 copies.

The 918 Spyder is eligible for a potential $3,667 federal tax credit for purchase of advanced hybrid vehicles, if you were on the fence about that $845,000 MSRP.

Buy this car and be spared theoretical matchups in the clubhouse. No bragging from the hedge fundie one locker over about his Lambo Sesto Elemento or McLaren P1 (best “Ring” time rumored to be 7:01). The 918’s “Ring” record is the ultimate conversation killer at cocktail parties. Oh, Porsche 918, well, yeah….

In the very tricky business of building immortal supersports cars—the 911 Turbo, the 959, the Carrera GT—Porsche has done it again.

And if it is snob appeal you want, please, it is a plug-in hybrid. In the U.S., Tesla Model S’s are outselling big sedans from Mercedes, BMW and Audi. You can’t get more courant than current. Actually, the 918 is eligible for a potential $3,667 federal tax credit for purchase of advanced hybrid vehicles, if you were on the fence about that $845,000 MSRP.

The 918 serves many masters in the Porsche narrative. It is a technology demonstrator, first, showing Porsche’s way forward in the engineering of extreme green performance. The car’s E-mode, electric-only mode, uses the front-axle mounted 127-hp electric motor for ranges up to 18 miles, enough to get the 918 in and out of city centers (European regulators would like to make big cities zero-emission zones) at speeds up to 93 mph.

To help appreciate the range of the 918’s achievement, consider that the same car with a 6:57 “Ring” record also gets somewhere around 79 miles per gallon on the highway.

I was able to grab an hour or so behind the wheel of two 918 Spyders last week, in the Eifel countryside around the Nürburgring complex, with Walliser as my co-pilot. The 918 is an astonishingly complex automobile, with exotica such as active aerodynamics and rear-wheel steering. The packaging density—that is, the sheer amount of machinery and plumbing concealed under the skin—is comparable only to perhaps a Bugatti Veyron.

Here is a quick sketch: the 918 Spyder is a two-seat, midengine coupe/Targa (”spyder,” with its connotations of minimalism, is a little ridiculous) with a full carbon-composite monocoque and skin, sublime in execution to the last millimeter. The top comprises two feather-light carbon panels storable in the trunk (in the interests of safety, the “Ring” record car used a special fixed roof).

The 918 is, roughly, a next-generation Carrera GT (2004), except that the 918 doesn’t feature that car’s pushrod suspension design, again because of packaging constraints. The 918 weighs 3,716 pounds, 660 pounds of which comprise the electrical hardware, according to Walliser, including the center-mounted battery pack, power controllers, the two big motors, as well as several clutch-pack differentials. By way of compensation, most of that mass is low in the chassis, putting the 918’s center of gravity 7 inches lower than that of a 911 Carrera.

Porsche

The interior of the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder

Mounted securely in its carbon-composite space-frame behind the seats is the star of the show: The 918’s naturally aspirated 4.6-liter, 90-degree, flat-crank, dry-sump V8, producing 608 hp, a record 133 hp per liter of displacement. A monster, in other words. In fuel-saving Hybrid mode, the powertrain management tries not to rouse the race-bred V8 unless it is really needed, relying on the torque provided by the 154-hp traction motor sandwiched between the engine and the seven-speed dual-clutch rear transaxle.

But when the V8 does ignite, skies darken, the film goes into fast forward and a strangely ferocious presence joins you in the car. One of the curiosities of the 918 is its two coffee-can-like “top pipes,” welded thin-steel chambers venting exhaust gases from the top of the deck lid, like a Formula One car. Because of an unexpected backpressure resonance in the tightly nested exhaust track, the 918 has a wild low-rpm gurgle, like an unplugged sewer line. “We call that the Leopard tank sound,” said Walliser. “We couldn’t change it so we decided it was character.”

Turning up the wick to either Sports- or Race-Hybrid mode fully entrains the V8 and both front and rear e-motors, for a total all-wheel drive system output of 887 hp and 940 pound-feet of torque. Zero to 60 mph goes by in a blink, 2.8 seconds; 0-124 mph, 7.9 seconds; 186 mph in 23 flat. It has a top speed of 211 mph. On my hour-and-a-half test drive, the car climbed swift, snared uphill sections like a runaway belt sander, but it was literally too much car to test on public roads, and in any gear but first, I had to bail out of the tach well short of the engine’s celestial 9,000 rpm.

If none of the other drive modes do it for you, you can press the “Hot Lap” button. That guarantees, at least for the next 13 miles or so, you’re driving the fastest sports car on the planet.

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